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What Every Debater Should Know About Economics

#1 TANSTAALF

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch," the saying goes. There is a cost of obtaining any good thing in this world. It may not be a money cost, and the recipient is not always the one who has to pay it, but there is a cost to someone all the same -an opportunity that is sacrificed to make that good thing available to the recipient. The reason is that good things are scarce in society -there isn't as much of them as people would like to have. To employ scarce resources to provide a good or service of one sort leaves less for producing others. This is all right if the good produced is more valuable than the goods sacrificed. Otherwise, it's trading good for bad. Tradeoffs are everywhere and arguments are often won or lost depending on who is the best at identifying the relevant tradeoffs for a particular situation.

Politicians and special interest groups are renowned for acting as though scarcity can be repealed by an act of the legislature. Watch for it in your research. Listen to evidence and you will hear the tell-tale signs. The argument will go like this: (1) X is a good thing; (2) There is not enough X; Therefore, (3) a law to increase the amount of X is a good thing. Case in point: The War on Drugs. Here the argument is (1) Drugs are bad; (2) Tougher drug enforcement reduces drugs; Therefore, (3) getting tough on drugs is good. What elements of scarcity are overlooked here? Well, police, courts, and prisons, to name a few. Leave aside the debatable assumption in (2) that drug enforcement actually reduces drug use. If the time and resources of the justice system are devoted to arresting, convicting, and punishing drug dealers this leaves less time and resources for bringing murderers, rapists, and armed robbers to justice. The 60 percent of federal prison space that is occupied by mostly non-violent drug offenders today is space that is not available for violent criminals2. Courts that once had high conviction rates for violent offenders now are clogged with drug cases and plea-bargaining is increasingly common. Meanwhile police spend time chasing dealers while more murder and rape cases go unsolved. Not surprisingly, higher drug enforcement expenditures correspond directly with higher rates of violent crime. Even if we achieve lower drug use, at what cost? There's no free lunch.

The privacy debate topic is one where trade-offs abound but are frequently ignored in public discussion. One example is the way public opinion polls are used to justify tougher privacy protection. People polled about whether they are are concerned about invasions of their privacy by businesses, governments, or individuals who collect personal information, overwhelmingly answer that they are. It is not at all clear from this that stricter protection of privacy actually is in accordance with peoples' values or concerns. Basing policy on such polls is similar to finding out that 95 percent of people surveyed would like a better car and then instituting a program of heavy taxation to finance new cars for everyone. Wanting a better car is one thing. Having to pay the cost is another altogether!

The increase in surveillance and accountability in modern society may be an annoyance at times, but a society where there are many watching eyes is also one where criminals and police are less likely to get away with bad behavior. Regulating the capacity for people and organizations to watch each other can reduce accountability in a society where it is sometimes easy to prey on others without fear of detection. When privacy is ranked as a concern with other public fears, such as the fear of crime or government corruption, it falls far down on the public's list, illustrating that the cost of many policies that increase privacy may be higher than the benefit.

2. David Kopel, "Prison Blues: How America's Foolish Sentencing Policies Endanger Public Safety," Cato Policy Report, May 17, 1994